• You can judge what a place will be like when you walk in and sense the atmosphere. The dark dank places where nobody even looks at you let alone raise a smile are to be avoided at all costs. Take a look at the clothes people are wearing; if they’re shabby, they’re not being paid enough and they’re too demoralised by this to be cheerful.
• If they point at a desk and tell you to get on with it, take a deep breath, sit down and start filing your nails – it just ain’t worth it.
• Always ‘get in’ with the doorman – very often they’re the only nice person in the building.
• Warning bells ring out when you arrive at a new place and they say, “Oh we have LOADS for you to do.” People always overestimate their workload, and ‘loads to do’ translates as roughly 3 letters and a fax, for the week!
• It takes a week before you’re comfortable enough to open your mouth and say something, and a month to really ‘get into a job’, which is unfortunate as most temping jobs only last a week.
• It can be very tedious looking at the A-Z all the time trying to figure out where you’re supposed to be first thing on Monday morning.
• The temping agency will do and say anything to get you into a position so wheedle every little bit of information out of them – 80% copy typing means a couple of memo’s and an email a day; taking messages on the phone means booking international plane flights and trying to find vacant hotel rooms in Kuala Lumpa.
• After a while you do tend to give up making ‘a good impression’ … nobody notices anyway, and you’re only there for a week.
• Never expect any praise or recognition for your work – after all, you’re only the temp. If someone actually says you’re ‘good’, try not to fall on the floor and kiss their feet, its very undignified.
• First thing you should try and do is make a list of everybody’s name, a floor layout of where everybody sits, and a list of their extension numbers. None of this will help if your brain automatically shuts off every time you hear the phone ring. If in doubt, admit you’re a temp and that you know absolutely nothing.
• Never forget that you’re ‘just the temp’. You will get all the shitty jobs, like a six month backlog of filing or all the typing nobody else wants to do.
• Assume that the next job is going to be as crap as the last one.
• Never underestimate other people’s capacity to ignore you.
• Don’t let anyone put you down. Not everyone wants to wear power suits and climb up the corporate ladder at the speed of light.
• There are terrible jobs out there being done by terrible people.
• Solicitors are mostly disorganised, chaotic and staffed by secretaries on valium.
• I was once stuck in a room furnished with only a computer on a table, and left to type for eight hours. My only conversation was with the coffee machine, for which I had to pay 20p (for the coffee, not the conversation).
• If it has free coffee and people who treat you like a human being, and if the phone only rings once every four or five hours, beg them for a permanent job.
• Once you get ‘into’ a job and know what you’re doing with a certain amount of confidence, you know it must almost be time to leave!
• It may help you to remember, when you’re in a pit of despair with a job you wouldn’t offer to your worst enemy, to remind yourself that they could have gotten a lot worse than you.
• The hassle with some jobs isn’t worth the money they’re paying you.
• If the temping agency suddenly offer you more money than you’re used to, there’s a catch, there’s something they’re not telling you – like everyone else on their books has refused to do it, and often for very good reason (which you won’t discover until you arrive at some shabby office block full of shabby people struggling to do crappy work).
• 20p for a cup of truly awful coffee from a ricketty old machine. That’s over £1 a day for a caffeine addict. Or worse, there’s no cup for you on the first day so you can’t have a drink at all. On the second day you have to drag in a separate bag full of coffee, sugar, milk, spoon, mug, and your sandwiches.
• Going for a smoke can sometimes be dangerous. In a mental hospital, you have to walk through all the wards in order to reach the smoke room, which is invariably bleak and yellow with no ventilation. Its hard to tell the difference between the staff and the patients. This can be a very depressing way to earn a penny.
• Never doubt that, once you leave, everyone will blame you, the temp, for absolutely everything that’s gone wrong in the last seven decades. You can almost hear the echo of their voices, all crying, “It was the Temp! The Temp did it!”
• With some jobs, you think, “Why do they work here, why do they stay?” And a day passes like a very long month, and you can’t stop looking at the clock, or timing your fag breaks closer and closer, or taking a very long time on the loo and finding you’ve only wasted 6.5 minutes.
• Smiling so much you’re face aches. When it hurts so much you can’t do it any more and you realise not one single person has smiled back, give up.
• After a while, you long to stay in one job and just get stuck in.
• Travelling hours in a huge metropolis … oh deepest joy. One hour and twenty minutes to get into the city, the same to get home again at night. You leave the house at 8am and don’t see the place again (and then only through a haze of exhaustion) until 6.30pm. You wonder why you do it, then you glance at your bank statement and realise why. Long hours, more hours of travelling, sometimes getting lost trying to find a new place, turning up at an assignment and realising instantly that its going to be ‘a bad one’ (temps quickly develop a sixth sense about this). And didn’t I used to have children once? Didn’t I used to have time to sit and relax and read? Real life can be such a drag.
• The size of your household domestic bills is directly proportional to the size of your salary – the more you get paid, the more you have to pay out. Nothing changes this, its sods law.
• The single working mother – knackered, stressed to breaking point, surrounded by ever-demanding people (not necessarily children) and an increasing sense of guilt (about everything; are the kids eating properly, are they spending too much time alone, are you devoting enough of your miniscule time with them, do you do enough for them, and when was the last time the poor dog got taken out for a walk). Welcome to my world!
• You come home, bone tired, your eyeballs burning with sheer exhaustion, and the house is a mess, the washing machine is leaking, the dog’s relieved himself on the hallway carpet, and the kids come racing excitedly down the stairs the minute they hear your key in the door (not to greet you and ask if you’ve had a good day, but to enquire what you intend to burn for tea.)
• You’ve been at a place for four whole months and you’re well into the swing of things, convinced they’re gonna offer you a job. Then the big boss comes over and says, “Right, you’ve done all the hard work [all the million tons of filing] we don’t need you any more, bugger off.” And you’re suddenly thrust back into the big bad world and start hassling your temping agency (who’ve probably forgotten your name) for work, work, you MUST have work.
• Finally, and most importantly, no matter how keen and enthusiastic you are and no matter how good an impression you want to make, do not, under any circumstances; (a) arrive for work early (and start work!) (b) work through lunch (no matter how much there is to be done - get out there and get some fresh air in yer lungs), or (c) work late (you do have a life, after all). If you break any of these three rules, you’re making a rod for your own back - they’ll start to expect it (trust me, I know). One day, in the not too distant future, when they expect you to work over to finish something and you say you can’t, they’ll be positively indignant. Start how you mean to go on. Work 9 to 5 with a break for lunch, and that’s it.
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